


Stranger in a Strange Land

by lmc291



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergent after 7x6, Daniel Can Maybe Get On Board With This Time Travel Thing, Daniel Hates Everything About the 70s Except Daisy's Jeans, Daniel Says Not Today Satan To This Season's B Villain, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, POV Daniel Sousa, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prayer, brief war flashback, new ship hoist the sails
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25472869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lmc291/pseuds/lmc291
Summary: He’s seen things. He’s been in foxholes on the wrong sides of HYDRA weapons. Hell, he left half his left leg in Metz. But this? This is straight out of Asimov and he knows that as soon as his brain catches up to his body it’s going to burst out of his skull.
Relationships: Skye | Daisy Johnson/Daniel Sousa
Comments: 28
Kudos: 248





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so glad there were already 92 fics in the tag when I decided holy shit I ship this.
> 
> Title from Heinlein.

Daniel really has no idea what to make of these people. He’s a skeptic and suspicious by nature and still half convinced that this is some Soviet plot to have Leviathan destroy SHIELD (again). He knows he should just ring Peggy-- the _real_ Peggy. He’d bet the farm that she has Dottie Underwood’s address in her rolodex, and Peggy was the one that Agent Simmons (if that was even her real name) was impersonating.

Even if it’s not a Ruskie plot, everyone at Area 51 should have been able to tell a fake Eastern Division Chief Margaret Carter from the real one. That sort of security hole needs closing.

But then he’s dead, and his universe shrinks to these seven people and their… time traveling airplane. A time traveling airplane with more interior space than his last two houses.

He needs a drink. 

Make that two.

He’s seen things. He’s been in foxholes on the wrong sides of HYDRA weapons. Hell, he left half his left leg in Metz. But this? This is straight out of Asimov and he knows that as soon as his brain catches up to his body it’s going to burst out of his skull.

When they land in the 1970s, he mostly hates it. It’s loud and uncouth and he has to stop that train of thought right there because he sounds like his father when he’s on a tear about how the radio isn’t playing Benny Goodman anymore. He tries not to think about it-- how ten minutes ago it was 1955. Agent Johnson tries to convince him to change his clothes, to blend in, but he can’t do it. If he takes off his suit, it’ll be real. It’ll make it real that he can’t go home. He doesn’t admit to any of this, and she throws him a winsome smile and calls him a fuddy-duddy. The twinkle in her eyes tells him she sees more than she lets on. 

(He can feel the heat creep slowly up his neck as he tries not to stare at the denim clinging to Agent Johnson’s rear in a way that makes his breath catch.)

They finally find the old gin joint Daniel remembers from long day wind-downs from the Stark Affair of ‘46. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised at the changes. It’s been close to thirty years-- of course it would have changed. But he had hoped…

He’s circulating the room trying to gather some intel and avoid the notice of Fred Malick (Fred Malick who should be dead, according to these guys), when he notices Agent Johnson trying to shake some grandstanding crumb. There’s something in the guy’s eyes that Daniel doesn’t like, so he makes his way over and slings an arm around her waist.

“Sweetheart, who’s your new friend?”

He almost expects the subtle pinch that would have come from Peggy if he tried to extract her from a conversation this way, but Agent Johnson leans into the embrace and he can feel the press of her curves against him.

“And you are?” the punk asks him.

“Her fiance,” he says with as much venom as he would have if he had caught some creep trying to corner a real fiancee.

She presses his chest lightly with her hand, everything about it feeling natural. “Honey, this is Gideon Malick.”

He bites the inside of his cheek. Of course it is. “Pleasure.” He doesn’t extend his hand and the kid notices the slight. “I think it’s time to leave.”

Agent Johnson looks up at him like they’ve got a secret to share and nods. “It was great meeting you.” Daniel wonders if he’s the only one who can hear the bite directed at Malik.

“You’re welcome for the drink,” Malick calls after them, and Daniel would really like to go back there and give him a good _thwack_ with his cane, but he’s a professional. And that would probably be the line Agent Johnson would draw for acceptable extraction behavior.

***

“You know, you _can_ call me Daisy.”

***

He volunteers to go with her to do the… stuff… with the thingamajig. He plays it off as a desire to learn more about how computing machines have changed and she needs a crack shot to watch her back. And that’s no lie. Daniel does want to learn and do all of that. What he doesn’t say is Daisy… she’s magnetic. Everywhere she is, he’s aware of it. It’s something he hasn’t felt in years. Not since Peggy, and he stopped pining after her years ago. 

Daniel isn’t completely clueless about women, and he doesn’t think he’s reading the situation wrong. They talk, and she angles her body towards him. She walks by and brushes her hand against his arm or his back in greeting. Maybe this future thing won’t be so bad.

In the split second between the other Malick kid pulling the trigger and the laser beam hitting him, he has just enough time to be furious with himself for getting distracted. When he wakes up in the barn, he’s torn between concern at Daisy still out cold next to him and relief that they didn’t take his prosthetic leg. The fatheads must have thought he’d be just as useless with it as without. 

They’re left alone for longer than Daniel expects, and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s missing something, or that Nathaniel Malick was waiting for something. He uses the time he has to plan. Their room is small, and there’s plenty of light streaming in, which means the walls can’t be very sturdy. If he could drag himself over to the other wall, he could probably claw back enough wood to make a hole big enough that they can escape from. But he has no gun, no idea how many guards there are, and they both have their hands and feet cuffed.

Then Nathaniel takes Daisy away and a cold rock drops in Daniel’s stomach. He talked about experimentation and taking Daisy’s blood, and Daniel knows that despite the agnosticism pouring out of Malick’s mouth, HYDRA hasn’t changed-- it’s just got more technology. It’s quiet for long enough that Daniel thinks they drugged Daisy back to sleep (he prays they drugged her back to sleep). A scream rips through the air and he knows she’s still awake, so he amends his prayers so that she stays alive.

Daisy is incoherent and fishbelly white when the goons bring her back slung between them. The last time he saw someone look this bad was when they were picking guys up off the field in France. They toss her to the ground like a sack of flour and she barely reacts. What was once just a small frisson of fear is now a claxon going off in his brain. 

“Daisy. Come on, Daisy, stay awake.” He pulls her into his lap as best he can with his bound hands. “Don’t fall asleep on me, okay? You’re not dying. Not today. Not on my watch.”

She’s muttering something and it takes a few guesses before he makes out “Jiaying. Jiaying.” He doesn’t know what Jiaying is, but she’s talking.

“Hey, I haven’t told you my story yet. You wanted to hear it remember? Yeah? You have to be awake for it though.” He runs his hands through her hair as he tells her about Mike Stevens yapping his ear off dragging him off the front line. Daisy’s shaking and still mumbling nonsense, but he’ll take it. She’s still alive. He just has to keep her that way-- has to figure out how to get them out before infection sets in or Malick decides he needs to bleed her dry to get what he wants. 

That’s when he notices the piece of glass she still has clutched in her hands. He gently pries it out of the gashes it’s wedged into and gives into the impulse to press a kiss to her forehead. “That’s my girl.”

Footsteps echo in the hall, and he quickly lays Daisy back on the floor and hides the shard inside his clasped hands. He decides the goon who comes in to uncuff his feet is the same idiot who let him keep his leg-- doesn’t even check to make sure Daniel is still unarmed. He jabs the glass into the guy’s chest and throat several times in quick succession and ignores how the warm arterial spray sends him straight back to 1943.

A few quick breaths bring him back to the present. The lack of machine gun fire and exploding shells helps. He rolls the guy off him and fumbles for the key still in his ankle cuff. He frees himself and then Daisy, and thinks about maybe getting both of them to their feet when the building shakes.

Daisy starts at it and he stares at her. Are her powers back? But no. Her eyes widen at something over his shoulder in the doorway.

“My bones are shattering.” Nathaniel Malick must have gotten the procedure to work, because the tremors are coming from him.

Daniel sees Daisy smirk and realizes something has gone terribly wrong for Malick. “It’s genetics, babe.”

And the building crashes down around them.

The dust settles and Daniel carefully gets up from shielding Daisy from the debris. She’s out cold and a quick glance tells him that Malick is, too. He debates with himself for far less time than he thinks he should have before limping over to retrieve the shard of glass out of the guard’s body.

He drags it across Malick’s throat. It’s inefficient and messy, but the only good enemy is a dead one. He learned that in France, too.

He checks the fasteners around his leg to make sure they’re secure before scooping Daisy up into his arms. He’s going to get them out of there, and dammit, he’s not going to let his leg be the reason they can’t. 

Eventually, the quinjet (quinjet, right?) finds them, and Daniel feels a relief settle in his joints that’s not just a relief for safety. He almost feels like he’s coming home.


	2. Chapter 2

Agent Simmons called it a healing chamber, but all Daniel can think of when he sees it is Snow White's glass coffin. (Mil begged and begged and begged to go see the film, and Daniel finally crumbled like a rickety house of cards. Anything to give Ma some peace and quiet.) Daisy looks still-as-death under the harsh fluorescent lights, but as the color slowly returns to her cheeks, she looks less and less like Snow White by the hour. There are many reasons why he doesn’t slide the lid open to kiss her awake, not the least of which is she’d probably clock him good for even thinking it.

His fingers itch for his rosary. Avó Inês gave it to him for his First Communion and leaving it in 1955 is probably his biggest regret. When it wasn’t in his bedside table it was in his jacket pocket-- for Sunday Mass and long distance missions, that’s the only time it left the house. Coulson, damn him, talked him into leaving it with the fake body, because _of course_ good, Catholic Daniel Sousa would have his rosary on him when he died.

He makes do: praying on ten fingers instead of ten beads. _Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee…_

He meditates on the Resurrection and the Ascension, finding the Glorious Mysteries oddly befitting for the man who suddenly found himself in the future, escaping the death he was supposed to meet. (A voice in his head that sounds like Avó’s screams blasphemy and he carefully stops thinking about comparisons to Christ Jesus.) 

He prays hard-- harder than he remembers ever praying. _Save Daisy. Heal her. Let her live._ He doesn’t bargain. Soldiers know better than to bargain. If the cup didn’t pass in Gethsemane, it does not pass for the common man but for God’s will. _Save Daisy. Heal her. Let her live. Save Daisy. Heal her--_

Simmons flits in and out to check Daisy’s vitals, but she also needs to focus on getting the time travel device fixed. May visits long enough to lay a hand on his shoulder and say, “Trust Simmons on this. She’ll be fine.” It’s Mack, when they get him and Deke back, who stays the longest. They sit in silence for a long while before Mack quietly asks for Daniel’s report from the barn. Mack’s only outward reaction when he describes what Nathaniel Malick did to Daisy is clenched hands, like he wants to go back, raise Nathaniel back from the dead, and knock out all his teeth.

Daniel wonders about Mack-- about what he and Daisy have been through together to evoke a reaction that seems stronger than a director concerned for an agent’s wellbeing. He doesn’t ask. It’s not his business.

He must have drifted off, because the next thing he knows is the sound of the healing chamber whooshing open. With a start, he sits up straight in time to see Daisy sliding out of it. “You’re awake,” he observes, brain still fuzzy from his nap.

She locks eyes with him, and he feels the weight of multitudes. “We’re in a time loop.”

What?

“We have to move fast. This is probably our last shot or we all die.”

_What?_

But he’s been in a war, and he’s been in the SSR. He knows how to think on his feet and hit a few curveballs. She talks fast and in sentence fragments. This has happened before. We need to move quickly. We need to talk to Enoch. She moves with determined purpose, but there’s a hitch in her voice and a tremor in her chin. A lead weight drops into the pit of his stomach.

He watches as they explain, haltingly, what has to happen to save them from the time vortex. How the only thing they can use is Enoch’s life force. All he can see, over and over and over again, is Billy Jones (bright, young, fresh from the draft office and barely able to grow peach fuzz Billy Jones) jumping on a grenade to save their unit. Then without ceremony, Enoch rips something out of his chest.

It’s too much. It takes all he has to stay with them. Simmons, Mack, May, Yo-Yo, and Deke all leave to fix the time machine, but Daniel ignores the easy out. He owes it to these people-- to Daisy, and Enoch, and all the guys he lost in the war-- to stay and bear witness. He sits down on the floor with them near Enoch’s feet. Enoch struggles to breathe, and Daniel realizes that it’s not just those slowly dying in a medical tent that get philosophical about their own mortality.

He rests his hand on Enoch’s ankle, offering the only comfort he can really give.

_Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee…_

Enoch meets his gaze and gives a short nod of understanding.

_Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee…_

They stay with Enoch until the very end, and then they stay a bit longer. Daisy’s eyes are bright with the tears she’s holding back and her lower lip is bitten almost raw for the effort.

“Go. I can handle it here.”

Daniel looks at Coulson and knows where he needs to be. He helps Daisy up from the floor and leads her out of the room. He could take her back to her bunk, but he knows people like her-- people who don’t like their grief on display for all and sundry-- and the path to her bunk leads through the command center.

So he pauses, not ten feet from the room they were just in, and wraps his arms around her. She heaves one, just one, heart-wrenching sob, and buries her head in his chest. They stand there in the hallway, and Daniel loses track of just how long they’re there. 

He’s right where he needs to be, stroking her hair as the tear stain grows larger and larger on his shirt. He’s right where he needs to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Of course Daniel Sousa is going to make sure Nathaniel Malick is Really Dead.


End file.
